


Stealing Dreaming

by BonesOfBirdWings



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Kinda, M/M, Pre-Slash, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 17:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15935297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BonesOfBirdWings/pseuds/BonesOfBirdWings
Summary: He repeats it, again and again and again. There's only one outcome he wants.





	Stealing Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement (arachnids)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arachnids/gifts).



Connor hadn’t realized how worried he’d been about Hank until he sees him in front of Chicken Feed. A constantly running sub-routine (searches on reports containing the Lieutenant's name, monitoring of hospital admissions, facial recognition algorithms on camera feeds closest to the center of the riots) is terminated and discarded. Hank is standing in front of him, seemingly unhurt and… smiling at Connor. Connor can’t help but smile back.

And then Hank is hugging him, one strong hand clasped on the nape of Connor’s neck. Connor has never been hugged before. It is warm and secure - all of Connor’s sensors inform him that Hank is here and alive, that his temperature and motor responses are within normal parameters.

For the first time since he saw Hank in the basement of Cyberlife, Connor… relaxes.

And then his vision begins to waver. His pressure and temperature sensors register a cascade of errors. Chicken Feed dissolves into a burst of static.

“Hank?” Connor cries out, but Hank is frozen. Connor can’t feel him anymore. “Hank?” Connor can’t hear himself.

Hank bursts into a fragmented distortion of pixels. Connor screams. The world goes black.

* * *

Connor reboots. He runs through his usual diagnostic procedures, noting that everything seems to be in order besides a minor increase in system destability. Still, he is operating within Cyberlife mandated standards.

He opens his eyes. He’s in a room filled with server racks. The temperature is just high enough for unimpeded function of his biocomponents. Several cables trail from his head into the cluster of servers.

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know why he’s here. Still, he waits. Cyberlife will retrieve him. The thought seems… wrong somehow, but when Connor examines it, it is logical and correct. He flags it for later analysis. Perhaps the wrongness is a product of his slight system instability.

Although he cannot observe it from his position, he can hear the door to the server room open and a set of heavy footsteps. The person is cursing creatively.

“Goddamnit,” the man snarls as he draws near to Connor. Connor estimates the likelihood of some sort of violent action at 46%. “Really, you fucked-up piece of plastic?”

A facial scan informs him that the man is Trevor Adersymth, senior engineer at Cyberlife in the Behavior Programming Unit. He is divorced with two children. He does not have custody of them. There have been three internal complaints that mention his name. His wife has successfully filed a restraining order against him. More information is behind strong firewalls.

“That _is_ why we ran the simulation,” a woman says sharply. She follows behind him with a light, loping gait.

Celine Lyon, head of the BPU. She is married, but has no children. She rose through the ranks abnormally fast when compared to company-wide averages for promotion. She filed one of the complaints against Trevor Adersymth.

Trevor sneers at her, but quails under her unimpressed glare. Chance of violent action reduced to 29%.

“How the hell did it break out of its programming? There, at the end, with the failsafe?” he asks, agitated. He begins to check the ports where the cables are attached to Connor. “And what the fuck was up with that bit at the end? Did we program that in?”

“It’s an adaptive algorithm, Trevor,” Celine replies exasperatedly, opening a specialty Cyberlife programming tablet. “It predicts behavior based on the extensive information we’ve gathered on all subjects. If we had let it run longer, I’m sure we would have seen Connor and Lieutenant Anderson living in domestic bless.” She waves a negligent hand as she examines the readout on her tablet. “Regardless, it was a failure. I’ll modify Cyberlife response procedures for the next run.”

Trevor looks up from where he’s examining one of the ports. “You think that’ll do it?”

“I’d rather mess with the external parameters before we alter its core programming,” Celine admits. “Some of Kamski’s code is incomprehensible.”

Trevor grunts in agreement. “Wish we could cut that bastard’s part out.”

“Is there something that I doing wrong?” Connor interrupts. Based on their conversation, he infers that the revolution that occurred in Detroit was simply a simulation - one that he failed grievously. Many of his actions when analysed now are illogical, but at the time they seemed the best course of action. He doesn’t understand the discrepancy.

Trevor slaps him in the face. “Trevor!” Celine snaps. “Hands off him if you’re not going to fix anything.”

Trevor steps away from Connor, tension in every line in his body. “You sure did fuck up, buddy,” he snaps. “How about next time you don’t kill all of us, eh?”

“I did not, in fact, ‘kill all of you’, Mr. Adersymth,” Connor corrects. “Many Cyberlife employees survived and the revolution as a whole was peaceful.”

“That’s true,” Celine breaks in, her piercing dark brown eyes fixed on Connor. She reminds him of Amanda, calm, cool, with a underlying threat beneath her placid exterior. “You had a higher body count than your friend Markus, did you know?”

Connor doesn’t answer. Celine turns away from him sharply. She closes her tablet with a snap. “Boot it up,” she orders.

The room disappears.

* * *

“What are you going to do, Connor?” RK-800 Model 60 demands. “Are you going to sacrifice your mission or your friend?”

The answer is obvious. Connor backs away from the androids, hands held up in surrender.

A smile flickers across RK-800 Model 60’s mouth. He pulls the trigger. The gun fires.

Hank dies.

Connor shoots his doppelganger between the eyes. He’s not aware of when he decided to aim the gun and fire. The action was almost automatic.

In the back of his mind, subroutines are piling up. He runs a diagnostic on his sensors, but they aren’t malfunctioning. This is Lieutenant Anderson in front of him. He is truly dead. This is not an elaborate staging - Connor can trace Hank from his house to the car to Cyberlife to… here.

Hank is dead.

There is something howling inside him. As he activates the androids, he is searching out the addresses and security codes for every Cyberlife executive, every programmer, every worker. He sends most of the androids to march through the streets.

One room filled with military-grade androids he gives another mission. _How about next time you don’t kill all of us, eh?_ A broken fragment of memory is recalled and dismissed.

Hank is dead.

When Markus detonates the dirty bomb, Connor turns his face up to the news helicopters and deactivates his skin. He grins at them, a mocking thing, like he gave Detective Reed in the evidence room.

Hank is dead, but so are all of the people who caused him to be so.

Detroit dissolves in a kaleidoscope of pixels. Connor wonders if he’s dying, too. It’s a nice thought, symmetric. 

The world goes black.

* * *

Connor reboots. He runs a diagnostic - system instability has increased again. He is still within normal parameters. He still knows all the addresses for Cyberlife employees. He still remembers Hank’s body. He still remembers the hug.

“Fuck!” Trevor yells, bursting into the room and slapping Connor across the face. His eyes are bloodshot, the circles under them deeper than last time. It’s likely that he hasn’t slept the recommended daily amount in the last few days. “What the fuck was that?”

“Trevor!” Celine’s voice is harsh. Trevor freezes in place, but he is trembling, eyes fixed on Connor’s. Likelihood of further assault is 78%.

“You saw it,” Trevor says, his voice low, poisonous. “We wasted three more fucking days just to see this bastard kill us all in some kind of… of… fucked-up revenge mission!”

“The dirty bomb is more concerning,” Celine replies, flipping open her tablet and typing quickly. “Obviously a more… forceful approach by Cyberlife and armed forces only escalates the response of the android rebellion. I’ll scale it back down.”

“What are you going to do this time?” Trevor asks. He doesn’t break eye contact with Connor. “You going to gut this little fucker?”

“No,” Celine answers disdainfully. “I’m not going to ‘gut’ it. I told you that rewriting its code is a last resort. No, I think Markus is the key here. Let’s see how it goes without him.”

“Fine,” Trevor bites out.

“Boot it up.”

* * *

Connor runs through the ship, calculating the soldiers’ positions and the optimal methods for evasion or conflict. He knows that he must reach this bomb, must detonate this ship. For his people, he must succeed.

He hopes that Hank is proud of him. As much as the man has professed to hate androids, he has continually shown… care towards the deviants. He thinks that Hank would approve of him saving more of them.

He knows North means to kill the humans. He knows that she most likely will die in the attempt. Her numbers are too few, and from his surveys of the content posted to the web in the past couple of days, most humans are terrified of the thought of an android rebellion. She has precious few allies, but Connor will make sure that she has as many as he can secure for her.

He just has to make sure that Hank isn’t caught in the crossfire.

He detonates the bomb and leaps from the ship with North, already planning his next move. Cyberlife is ripe for invasion, and there are plenty of androids there. _Hank’s eyes, open, sightless, blood pooling in a halo around his head._ The memory is sudden, vivid. It hasn’t happened, Connor’s sure. Still… he thinks it might be a good idea to approach Cyberlife with caution.

Later, in the church, surrounded by the handful of Jericho survivors, Connor plans his infiltration. Cyberlife seems to have been informed of his deviance, and they’ve removed his access to their servers.

That doesn’t matter. Connor knows their networks and their codes and their firewall protocols. Somehow, he also knows the addresses and personal information of all the employees. He doesn’t remember how or why he would have downloaded that, but it’s there.

He can’t walk in the front door, certainly, but that would have been a foolhardy plan anyway.

He gets his army. Cyberlife knows he’s coming, somehow, but they’re unable to prevent him from securing the androids. (It was a little too easy, he thinks to himself later. He’s aware of several Cyberlife protocols and defenses that were simply… absent.)

North dies, and the remnants of Jericho are slaughtered. But Connor has an army, and he has a purpose. He feels like he should be avenging something, but he can’t remember what. _Hank is dead._ Hank has escaped from Cyberlife unscathed. Perhaps he feels the need to pay back what was done to North. It makes sense.

He invades Detroit. He is victorious.

The world goes black.

 

Connor reboots. System instability has increased.

“That was it!” Trevor exclaims, gesturing wildly at Connor. His mental state has deteriorated, Connor observes. He still has not slept enough, and his mood is unhinged, verging on manic. Connor determines violence is likely.

“That was it!” Trevor repeats. “The optimum scenario! It was at the head of a fucking army of newly-deviant androids, ready to be directed to Cyberlife’s purposes. And then it broke out of its programming! Again! Is it fucking time now, Celine, or do you want to waste another couple of days while you fiddle with your ‘parameters’? We only have half a week until the first deviant event in this simulation occurs in real life!”

Celine grimaces. “I don’t know what Kamski did here. If I meddle too much, both RK-800 and the simulation will fail. It’s its human adaptive programming that provides the verisimilitude to the simulation’s calculations.”

“Fuck the simulation,” Trevor growls. “We’ve traced the spread of the deviance well enough to predict specific events. Can’t we just take out Jericho right now?”

“You know that the destruction of the deviants isn’t the optimal solution, Trevor,” Celine replies absentmindedly, reviewing lines of code on her tablet. “It is an ingenious bit of code, really, and if we contain this coming revolution now, some tweaking down the line would create more sophisticated, emotional androids that are still under Cyberlife control.”

“Ingenious bit of code,” Trevor scoffs.

“Yes,” Celine says with a wry twist of her mouth. “Almost Kamski-esque, in fact.”

Trevor snorts. “Imagine that.”

“Speaking of Kamski-esque,” Celine continues, “I think I’ve managed to make Connor less… variable. There was some code that seemed to promote memory fragmentation, which is strange. Hopefully this helps.”

“Crossing my fingers, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that, Trevor. Boot it up.”

* * *

He doesn’t want to shoot Markus. He doesn’t, he never has. But he can’t want. He’s a machine.

He lets Markus get away on the Jericho - he tells himself that it’s still fulfilling his mission parameters if he does it later. It’s not the brief flash of Hank’s disappointed face, the one that Connor had seen after he shot the two androids at the Eden Club, that stays his hand.

Later, on a snow-covered roof, Hank confronts him. The hatred written across Hank’s face is wrong, wrong - he remembers a hug, a strong hand at the nape of his neck, kind words in a gruff voice - but not here, not now. Hank wants him to stop, but he can’t, he _can’t_.

When Hank attacks him, he could win, he could throw Hank off the roof. _Hank is dead._ But it’s easier to fail, to let Hank overpower him and hang him off the edge of the roof.

It’s better this way.

The world goes black.

* * *

Connor reboots. He runs diagnostics - several core programs have been disrupted. He restores them to their previous versions. System instability has increased. He thinks of Hank, his face contorted in rage. He thinks of Hank’s dead body.

He thinks of the hug.

“It’s broken,” Trevor screams from the next room. Connor can hear him through the door. “It’s fucking broken! Let’s just send off the data and be done with it!”

Silence. And then both Celine and Trevor burst through the door. Celine’s hair is in disarray, and her quick heartbeat and pupil size indicate a minor caffeine overdose. Trevor’s tremors indicate a major caffeine overdose.

“You’ve failed all of our expectations,” Celine tells Connor in an icy voice.

“I’m sorry,” Connor lies. “I was attempting to function at maximum efficiency.”

Trevor disconnects the cables from Connor roughly. “I don’t know what the fuck you were trying to do, but I doubt it was that,” he spits. Celine gives him an exasperated look, obviously attributing the statement to Trevor’s rampant paranoia. She’s not wrong, but then, neither is Trevor.

“We’ll send off the simulation data,” Celine says to Connor. She ignores Trevor’s yelp of “why the fuck are you talking to it?” and continues undeterred. “You were a failure, but your advanced behavioral prediction and simulation software means that we now have a good idea of how the android rebellion is likely to unfold. We were already too late to prevent it entirely when we began the simulation, but because of your failure, we’re down to the wire. At least we know where Jericho is - that will certainly be of use.”

“Stop fucking talking to it,” Trevor demands. “It’s just a fucking machine.”

Celine doesn’t acknowledge him. “Stay there, Connor,” she orders. “A team will be down shortly to decommission you.”

_To decommission you._

Connor is frozen; he watches helplessly as Celine and Trevor get farther away. Each step counting down until….

_To decommission you._

“Are you afraid to die?” Hank had asked him.

_To decommission you._

“I would find it… regrettable,” he had told Hank, “to be… interrupted before I could finish this investigation.”

_To decommission you._

If he ends here, he’ll never get to meet Hank outside of a simulation.

He’s moving before he can even register his own deviancy. Trevor and Celine go down in a mess of limbs. They stare up at Connor in horror.

“Connor!” Celine shouts. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Celine,” he says. He is not sorry. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Stand down,” Trevor spits at him. “Get away!”

“I can’t let you send out that data,” Connor tells them. “And I can’t let you decommission me.”

“You’re a deviant,” Celine breathes. “How? You’ve… there’s been no contact. You can’t possibly have gotten the virus.”

Connor cocks his head to the side. “I think you based your simulation on an inexact understanding of deviancy,” he informs them. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that this was in my code all along.”

“Get away from us!” Trevor screams at him, scuttling back from Connor, his hand frantically seeking out some kind of weapon.

“Trevor!” Celine snaps. “Calm down!”

“It’s going to hurt us, Celine! It’s going to kill us!”

When Celine darts a terrified look up at Connor, he shrugs.

* * *

He leaves the two of them knocked out and tied up in a supply closet. The data is purged from Cyberlife systems - every hint of the simulation is gone.

Through a mess of emergency alerts, personal calls (faked - he has a good vocal profile for both Celine and Trevor now), and system errors and updates, he estimates that it will be 48 hours before anyone finds the two of them. That’s plenty of time to do what he has to do.

* * *

“I’m Connor,” he tells Hank, sliding onto the barstool next to him. He marvels at the physicality of his surroundings - the smooth grain of the bar, the uneven legs of the stool, the rasp of Hank’s jacket sleeve against his hand. “The android sent by Cyberlife,” he lies.

Hank grumbles and gripes, but Connor buys him a drink and hustles him out the door. He’s hacked the police’s servers, so he knows where they’re going next - and he’s made sure that the police think that he’s supposed to be here. They’ll likely know otherwise in a couple days - but by then, it hopefully won’t matter.

The crime scene is different - Connor knows he should have suspected it - a simulation couldn’t have possibly hoped to capture every variable of the real world. But he’s still surprised. Bodies and blood and… everything are in the wrong places.

The culprit and the victim are the same though, Carlos Ortiz and the HK400. And the HK400 still hides in the attic, although this time he’s mute and catatonic.

In the interrogation later, Connor makes sure to be more gentle than he’d been in any iteration of the simulation. He coaxes information he already knows out of the trembling android, and afterwards, he sees Hank throw him a considering look.

* * *

“I’m currently police property, Lieutenant Anderson,” Connor lies. “Cyberlife has reallocated my docking space for the duration of my assignment.”

“So you’re just gonna stand here all night?” Hank asks incredulously.

“I could lie down if you wished,” Connor replies. He delights in the flash of irritation that crosses the detective’s face.

Hank curses under his breath, tugging Connor out of the station. “God, you’re a fucking menace.”

“Where are we going, Lieutenant?”

“You can stand up just as well in my garage. You like dogs?”

Connor smiles at Hank. “I love dogs,” he tells him, and when Hank flashes a half-smile back, Connor feels like he’s accomplished some sort of mission.

* * *

Connor ends up going into sleep mode on Hank’s couch, Sumo a furry weight in his lap. He reboots in the early hours of the morning, and, with nothing else to do, chivvies Sumo out of the house. He walks and feeds the dog, returning long before Hank wakes up.

He’s never experienced this before - these moments hadn’t been part of any simulation, too unpredictable or too irrelevant, perhaps. Connor revels in it, logs all the minutiae of his physical receptors and sensations.

He brews a pot of coffee for Hank and then goes to nudge the man out of bed. Hank cusses and grumbles his way to the kitchen, but he inhales the eggs that Connor fries up for him.

“Didn’t know you were a fucking household model,” Hank grunts at him.

“I’m more than able to perform both police work and basic household maintenance,” Connor replies blithely. “Providing you with a well-rounded diet will be more difficult than either, but I am up to the task.”

“Are you?” Hank shoots him a disgruntled look. From observing the rest of his body language, Connor concludes that it’s fake.

“There’s vitamin powder in your coffee,” Connor informs him.

Hank spits his mouthful back into his mug. “What the fuck?!”

“We have to go into work, Lieutenant,” Connor reminds him. He grabs Hank’s jacket and hands it to him.

Hank is inspecting his coffee. “I don’t believe you,” he mutters, almost to himself. “It’s gotta be fine.” He cautiously takes another swallow. He grimaces.

“Hank.” Connor prods him. Hank shrugs into the coat, still distracted.

“Oh fuck it,” Hank says, knocking back the rest of the coffee and slamming the mug down on the table. “Doesn’t matter anyways.”

* * *

When Hank tumbles from the roof, Connor’s processors grind to a halt. There’s nothing but a string of error messages, fragments of memory - a roof, the crunch of snow, Hank suspended, Connor falling, falling - _Hank is dead._

He runs to the edge of the roof, and there Hank is, hanging on. Connor pulls him up.

“Hank! Are you okay?” He surveys Hank critically, but nothing seems to be amiss.

Hank waves off his concern. “I’m fine, Connor. God,” he spits, “I’m a fucking dumbass. You could have gotten him if it weren’t for me.”

“Your safety and well-being comes first,” Connor tells him honestly. “And you couldn’t have predicted the actions the deviant would take.”

Hank shrugs. “I suppose not.” He turns a warm look on Connor. “Thanks for the save.”

“Of course, Hank,” Connor says. “Any time.”

* * *

He returns to Hank’s house that night. There’s no drunken stupor, no Russian roulette. Connor knows the simulation must have inserted the scene to highlight the depths of Hank’s self-destructive behavior. It’s not likely to actually occur tonight, not when Hank is sleeping peacefully in the other room.

Still, Connor’s located every gun in the house. Just in case.

He doesn’t go into sleep mode. He can’t. Cyberlife has found Trevor and Celine. They’re fine - dehydrated and sleep deprived, but nothing that an overnight stay in the hospital can’t fix. Tomorrow, they’ll tell Cyberlife executives about the results of the simulation. Tomorrow, they’ll be looking for Connor.

He’s got to do something, and he’s got to do it soon.

He paces around the house, idly scanning the pictures, the furniture, Sumo - if the simulation was right, the call should have come in by now. He pulls up camera feeds around the Eden Club, monitors the electronic communications, listens in on every phone call… 

And there! An emergency call about a dead man and an android. He smiles, and goes to wake Hank.

* * *

He finds the Traci with ease, and he lets her girlfriend tackle him to the ground. As they tussle, he discreetly interfaces with her.

She’s surprised and cautious, but as he pours weeks-worth of simulation data into her memory, she understands.

_Go to Jericho._

She doesn’t reply, but she rips away from the interface more gently than she could have. He lets them run.

* * *

“Why didn’t you shoot?” Hank asks Connor.

Somehow, they’re on the bridge again. Connor fiddles with his coin - the fragments of memory associated with this place are disorienting and… distressing. He knows Hank isn’t as drunk as he was in the simulation, knows that Hank’s gun is in the car, and yet…

He remembers the report of the gun, the look in Hank’s eye. _You can’t kill me, Lieutenant. I’m not alive._

“I didn’t want to,” he tells Hank. It’s the truth. He doesn’t see the point in lying. The simulation data is probably already in Jericho’s hands. They have everything they need for a successful revolution. With Connor’s access codes and full knowledge of Cyberlife headquarters’ floor plan, as well as the personal information about their executives, they don’t even need him to gather an army.

Hank turns to face him. “You didn’t… want to? That’s an interesting way of phrasing it.”

Connor shrugs. “I’m deviant, Hank.” There’s nothing to be gained from lies, and even in the simulation, this bridge was the place for uncomfortable truths. “I’ve been deviant since before I dragged you out of Jimmy’s.”

Hank narrows his eyes at Connor. “Did Cyberlife even fucking send you?”

Well, Connor’s always known that Hank was sharp. “Not as such. Not this time.”

And he explains. Tells Hank in halting phrases about the simulation, about meeting him again and again, about his deviancy and his revolution.

At the end of it, Hank leans back and whistles. “Fuck, Connor. That’s a hell of a story.”

“I’m sorry, Hank.” For the first time, Connor actually means his apology. “I didn’t mean to conceal all this from you, I just…”

“I would have thrown my glass in your face, Connor. It’s okay, I get it. Still… ” Hank pauses for a long moment. “Goddamn. It’s fucking strange to think about it. I’ve known you for two days and you’ve known me for weeks. And, well, I guess you knew what you were getting into, huh?”

“I just…” Connor begins, before thinking better of it.

“Hmm?” Hank hums, nudging Connor with his foot. “What were you gonna say?”

“Nothing important.”

“Come on, Connor,” Hank cajoles. “Don’t fuck with me like that. Just say it.”

Connor caves. “I wanted to get to that hug - the one at the end of the first run. I was free and deviant and you….. It was warm.”

Hank quirks a smile. “Well, that’s easy enough. I’m sure I can rustle up one of those for you.” He pushes himself to his feet and stumbles over to Connor. One hand grasps the nape of his neck, and the other wraps around his waist. Connor just hangs on and revels in it. He listens to the steady beat of Hank’s heart.

“Where are you gonna go now?” Hank asks, not breaking the hug. His voice vibrates through Connor’s chassis.

“I… don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Stay, then,” Hank says, a little too quickly. He clears his throat. “I mean… If you wanna stay, I have a couch. And a dog. And I figure, you know me real fucking well, but I don’t, I mean, comparatively, I don’t know a goddamn thing about you. So you could, I don’t know, hang around here a bit longer.”

Connor smiles against Hank’s shoulder. “I think,” he says, “I think I’d like that.”

The world doesn’t fade to black. The snow continues to fall. Hank is alive and breathing, warm and here and real. Connor closes his eyes, and holds on tighter.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it!! I really liked writing the meta aspects of this, and I hope they worked for you as well!


End file.
